What makes light intrusive and polluting

Explore the effects of light pollution on the night sky with Light Pollution Interactive. Glare from unshielded lighting is a public-health hazard—especially the older you become. Glare light scattering in the eye causes loss of contrast, sometimes blinds you temporarily and leads to unsafe driving conditions, for instance. Skyglow refers to the glow effect that can be seen over populated areas.

Skyglow is the combination of all the reflected light and upward-directed unshielded light escaping up into the sky and for the most part, unused. By participating in the citizen-science campaign, Globe at Night, and taking as many measurements as you can from different locations, you will be promoting awareness and helping to monitor light pollution levels locally.

The worldwide database is used to compare trends over years and with other data sets like on animals to see what effects light pollution has on them. Thank-you for your interest and participation in Globe at Night. What is Light Pollution? Introduction A little more than years ago, you could walk outside at night even in a city and see the Milky Way galaxy arch across the night sky. All residents at Relko Gardens have been offered alternative accommodation.

You can continue to call us at Make an neighbourhood nuisance enquiry here. More info. You are here: Home Waste, environment and streets Environmental health Pollution Light pollution Light pollution Light pollution is best described as artificial light that is illuminating or polluting areas not intended to be lit. Light nuisance may constitute a statutory nuisance under the Environmental Protection Act provision added by the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act It is also a source of information, telling organisms when to sleep, hunt, hide, migrate, metabolize, and reproduce.

Since the advent of incandescent light bulbs, humans have been interfering with those messages. And the interference is worsening with the spread of LEDs, which consume less electricity and so are often brighter and stay on longer and later than their predecessors.

Since , when a satellite began taking detailed measurements, light emissions have been rising at a rate of 2. Previous work showed that light emissions are growing by as much as 20 percent in some regions.

This is faster than the average annual growth of the global economy , the global population, and emissions of carbon dioxide. Read: The Milky Way is disappearing. A decade ago, he was one of the few scientists calling for more research on artificial light at night.

Today he leads a program called the Loss of the Night Network , a multinational, transdisciplinary research group under the umbrella of the European Union. Professional and amateur sky watchers have complained for decades that city lights interfere with their observations, leaking into telescopes and obscuring their views of distant stars and galaxies.

Beginning in the s, astronomers began lobbying lawmakers to protect observatories , with mixed results. But as nearby San Diego grew, the horizon around the mountain filled with light anyway. To promote model lighting rules and encourage their peers to speak as a group, the astronomers David Crawford and Tim Hunter founded the International Dark-Sky Association in Crawford was a professional astronomer, and Hunter an amateur enthusiast.

But the lights of the world have continued to brighten. By the turn of the millennium, ecologists were taking notice too. In , the American researchers Travis Longcore and Catherine Rich organized the first conference on the ecological consequences of artificial light at night. That meeting, and a research textbook that Longcore and Rich published afterward, are widely considered the genesis of interest in the environmental-science community.

But ecological research on artificial light was still a niche subject. Read: Animals are going nocturnal to avoid humans. He soon began to see a correlation between light levels and changes in activity in common types of freshwater fish such as bream, roach, and perch. This makes some cultural—and practical—sense. While most mammals are nocturnal, humans are not.

The ability to illuminate the world at will is part of what makes us who we are, and has been for millennia, since long before streetlamps, long before cities, long before stories about evil darkness and virtuous light.

The results emerged quickly and with certainty. In artificially lit environments, songbirds advance their egg-laying ; wallabies delay their births ; salmon change their migration ; fish delay their spawning ; and maple trees keep their leaves later in the fall , which can cause frost damage. The list goes on. European lampposts are generally about 20 to 45 meters apart, so the area they illuminate overlaps.

This might be nice for pedestrians, but for insects it acts as a trap, preventing their dispersal through the environment. Other animals respond too, in a cascade that changes the makeup of entire communities. Read: What if we gave up on the stars? In another study , he and his colleagues observed spiders, harvestmen also called daddy longlegs , beetles, and other predators positioning themselves near streetlights like diners at a buffet. But as any ecologist will point out, artificial-light levels are just one of the many differences between urban and rural areas.

The Lake Lab is designed to eliminate those additional factors in order to isolate the effects of light. Gessner, a systems ecologist, was not initially drawn to studying light.

But in urban areas, and even in many rural areas, a more insidious problem is skyglow, or the indirect illumination caused by light bouncing off the atmosphere—the same process that turns the daytime sky blue. On a clear night, skyglow can render a city five times brighter than it would be under natural conditions.

On an overcast night, when light reflects off both the ground and the clouds, the sky can be 1, times brighter than it would be otherwise. Skyglow covers so much of the Earth that one-third of humanity can no longer see the Milky Way. About 99 percent of the population in North America and Europe lives under light-polluted skies. In a city, or even in the suburbs, you might not notice skyglow; the clouds just seem bright.

But far away from development, the contrast is clearer. Clouds are not blankets of bright haze, but instead dark smudges covering the stars. Cities appear on the horizon not as points of light, but as domes, their light reaching far into the atmosphere and reflecting off clouds and water droplets.

Read: Are cities making animals smarter? The Lake Lab is skyglow-free: Surrounded by the Stechlin-Ruppiner Land Nature Park, it is located in one of the darkest areas in Germany, and arguably one of the darkest regions in western Europe. To simulate varying levels of skyglow at the Lake Lab, Andreas Jechow, whose background is in experimental physics and photonics, devised light rings to produce an evenly distributed layer of light one meter below the lake surface.

To study how this simulated skyglow affects aquatic life, automated pulleys sink into the depths at regular intervals, carrying cameras and water-sampling equipment to study everything in the water column.